There was a twitter retweet by Rob Neyer who suggested someone lead with that for a headline. Obviously for a blog like mine its much easier to do than a national blog or newspaper, but its fun to do anyway. Last night concluded the first week in baseball, and also concluded our league’s first week of head to head. Many of your know that this blog features two leagues here, one that I have run with my circle of friends, and one that I started this season and opened to the Internet.

This post is for the circle of friends league, as last night before the two night games my match-up with my fiancee was in a dead heat. I had a 22 point lead thanks to a great start by Ubaldo Jiminez, and a lackluster start by her Johan Santana. Because of the rain delay in San Francisco we had two games on our table and 7 players in play between us.  She had Ricky Weeks, Prince Fielder, Yadier Molina, Ryan Franklin, and I had Billy Wagner, Brian Wilson, and Matt Holliday.

Half way through the night, I was sweating the 1 run game in San Fransisco as that makes blown saves much easier to come by, and that would potentially ruin my week. On the other channel, Weeks gets a single, homer, and a walk, Prince Fielder adds a single and a walk, Yadier got a couple points as well.

Headed into the 8th inning of the Giants/Braves game I was only up by 7 points, a blown save is worth -10, so imagine my nerves as Brian Wilson began warming up. Meanwhile the Cardinals are managing a come back which could mean a Ryan Franklin save (usually around 8 points assuming no homers, walks allowed).

My fiancee and I sat in nervous anticipation as we knew the climax of the night was coming. Thankfully the Giants led by Pablo Sandoval took a 4 run lead, removing any chance for a save situation. However, that hurt as well because I could have used some positive points from Brian Wilson to help pad my lead as my fiancee was a double and a homer away, or simply a save, to win.

Trevor Hoffman comes in the game to “shut down” the Cardinals, and Pujols who is 0-6 lifetime against Hoffman, to which my fiancee says, “He sucks against Hoffman, its all over” Pujols promptly answers with a home run. My boy Matt Holliday after a 0 for 4 showing, follows up Pujols with a back to back homer. Thus giving me the padding I needed.

The two teams were tied at 7 and Hoffman got out of the inning.  In the bottom of the ninth the Brewers were able to manage a solo walk off homer thus ending an exciting week of fantasy baseball. My fiancee bummed by her loss, but we both agreed that it was very fun that it was at least very close. I love baseball.

When hashing through these replacement values, there is an imperfect science going on. First of all, we are using projections that are based on a computer’s guesses, and assuming many many factors. However that is half the fun before the season starts so we will use these imperfect numbers anyway.

Based off of yesterday’s post I determined that replacement value should be a give or take average of the 5 guy’s projection season totals past 16 starters, and 8 back-ups.  However for catchers I assume that almost everyone will at least have 1 back up catcher, and I assumed the 1B position was 8 spots deeper as they are more likely to be used in a utility role. So that may sway numbers as well.

The only way to really make these things perfect is to do them after the fact, and that doesn’t really help me write right now. For fun I took the top 8 projected catchers, 1st basemen, 2nd basemen, and 3rd basemen and figured out their perceived value.

Joe Mauer    457.9    11.316
Victor Martinez    380.1    8.204
Brian McCann    369.8    7.792
Matt Wieters    349.9    6.996
Geovany Soto    341.6    6.664
Russ Martin    314.9    5.596
Jorge Posada    314.8    5.592
Yadier Molina    313.3    5.532

From that alone you can see that Joe Mauer is pretty darn good. Sorry for the poor formatting, I cannot figure out how to make it better. But anyway, Joe Mauer is 11 points each week, on average, better than the best available free agent catcher. Lets look at 1B:

Albert Pujols    604.9    13.596
Prince Fielder    542.6    11.104
Adrian Gonzalez    516.9    10.076
Mark Teixeira    514.3    9.972
Miguel Cabrera    473.4    8.336
Ryan Howard    471.1    8.244
Kevin Youkilis    460.5    7.82
Adam Dunn    455.2    7.608

and 2nd basemen:

Chase Utley    516.6    9.224
Dustin Pedroia    450.3    6.572
Ben Zobrist    438.1    6.084
Brian Roberts    428.9    5.716
Dan Uggla    416.6    5.224
Robinson Cano    414.8    5.152
Ian Kinsler    394.4    4.336
Aaron Hill    388    4.08

Finally the third basemen:

Alex Rodriguez    508    9.28
David Wright    496    8.8
Evan Longoria    473.3    7.892
Kevin Youkilis    460.5    7.38
Ryan Zimmerman    449.4    6.936
Pablo Sandoval    433.1    6.284
Mark Reynolds    414.6    5.544
Chase Headley    410.2    5.368

My first thoughts on this information was that I’m surprised that Joe Mauer wasn’t the highest. However ESPN projects Mauer to score less than last season, while not missing a month. So by that thought it makes sense. If he only matched last season’s production stretched over a full season he’d be higher than Pujols. However this is some pretty awesome stuff. The second surprise is the value of Chase Utley. The difference between having Utley on your roster and Pedroia is almost 3 points a week. In a 16 team league if you happen to get the 8th best second basemen, Aaron Hill, you’re already 5 points behind Utley that week. The quality of 2B really falls off a cliff.

If you were to tier out 2nd basemen, you could draft Utley as a tier 1/round 1 guy, then based on ESPN’s projections there’s a 2nd tier of Pedroia, Zobrist and perhaps Brian Roberts, however they’re all more likely a 3rd tier with an empty second tier, and then past that you won’t need to reach for a second basemen as they all are within coin flips of out performing each other.

The 3rd basement looked like a pretty steady decline from 1 to 8 on value. A-Rod is about 4 points better than the 8th best guy which is a big difference, but it is far from above and beyond. Let’s look at Pujols and the 1B however.  They seem to get a boost as their replacement level player might be slightly lower than the next position as more 1B (I’m predicting) will be used in the utility spot than any other position. But from 1 to 8 Pujols is 6 points a week better than an average 1st basemen.

Based on this preview, based on ESPN rankings, if I had to pick from these 4 positions and had my choice of the litter, I think I’m taking Chase Utley. I feel like Utley is going to be healthy again, on a good team that will push him to play his best all the time, for the whole season. Utley is so much better than all of his kin that he provides the best advantage going into the season for me. Joe Mauer plays catcher which means he is prone to taking days off, and getting hurt. Pujols is my 2nd choice, and could easily be my first, however the spring training back problems really scare me.

In the first round the difference between Mauer, Utley and Pujols is not terribly huge, you won’t get more than one, and they all provide the same type of leg up on the competition as the other. Tomorrow we’ll look at short stops and out fielders to see if there are any other hidden gems out there. Friday I will look at pitchers, and next week Monday I’ll release my opening day big board. I haven’t decided where to go with the feature, but I plan on making it pretty special and updating it either routinely or randomly throughout the season.

15 interested humans plus myself are preparing for a draft in eight days of epic proportions. This league has 16 teams, a head to head by points setup, using balanced wOBA and FIP for the points, among other things. It should be a great amount of fun, the draft order won’t be decided until its randomly made an hour before the draft.

So lets ponder, who goes first overall? This season we are not going with a keeper setup (I want to establish a good group of owners, before we start working a keeper league), so you want the best team this season.

I have written about Joe Mauer already, I think he’s even stronger now because there’s not even a dozen catchers who play daily, let alone 16. If I had the first pick, I’d have issues passing on him.

Albert Pujols is just to easy, last year he was the best, a full season of Joe Mauer changes things, so this year might be different.

Hanley Ramirez is on top of the short stops, and in a league of 16 starts to have the Joe Mauer effect of giving your team a huge head start just by being so much better than your opponents short stop.

Tim Lincecum, young apparently durable, pitching for a large contract in a couple seasons, can’t bet against him, 16 teams means our league will have 100ish starting pitchers drafted, Lincecum might be to good to settle.

There’s to many variables to guess, but in a 16 team league, it will be very interesting to see how the first round plays out. Next week I’ll project the first round, but any of these 4 guys would be legitimate picks. I’m so very excited!

Keeper leagues are a bittersweet concept. It is extremely fun to have great players for consecutive seasons, and it is great that there’s extra strategy added to the mix. The league flows better from year to year, as everyone still has reason to stay in touch with the league.

The dark side however is that if your favorite player is Albert Pujols, you likely have little shot at getting him on your team. Even in a fresh league the odds of drafting him are slim to none, but he’s not the type of player to get tossed back into the draft.

In my own league our keepers get more expensive each season. If a player is drafted in the 20th round they’re the free “prospect” keeper. Players taken in the first 5 rounds cost $3 to keep the next season, the next 5 rounds cost $2, and all remaining rounds, including free agents, cost $1.  Each team gets to keep $5 worth of players.  Kept players get a $1 raise if kept another season.

In our league the owner of Albert Pujols got the 1st overall pick. Hence, he then was given a break by not having to spend $4 to keep Pujols again, keeping Carl Crawford and Jacoby Ellsbury instead. Now Pujols is in the pool, and his keeper “clock” is again reset.

I’m not sure how other leagues do keepers, I know there is many different styles of keeper leagues. Do your leagues allow this type of “manipulation”? A couple of my fantasy owners are disgruntled with this situation. As the commissioner, I do not have rules against it, so it is hard for me to be upset with the situation. Also I don’t know if Pujols is going to continue to be the best player in the league forever anyway, (rumors have it that he has back injuries!) so it may not matter in the long run.

So would an experience like this ruin fantasy baseball for you? How do you value your favorite players in a competitive league? Myself personally I would love to have Felix and Ichiro every season, however I don’t plan on getting either one as it generally means I need to over pay for them.